User:Twixie13/sandbox

In the past twenty years, most of the major technological breakthroughs in consumer electronics have really been part of one larger breakthrough. When you get down to it, CDs, DVDs, HDTV, MP3s and DVRs are all built around the same basic process: converting conventional analog information (represented by a fluctuating wave) into digital information (represented by ones and zeros, or bits). This fundamental shift in technology totally changed how we handle visual and audio information -- it completely redefined what is possible.

More to the point digital cameras focus light onto a semiconductor to create a digital image. Let's say you want to take a picture and e-mail it to a friend. To do this, you need the image to be represented in the language that computers recognize -- bits and bytes. Essentially, a digital image is just a long string of 1s and 0s that represent all the tiny colored dots -- or pixels -- that collectively make up the image. (For information on sampling and digital representations of data, see this explanation of the digitization of sound waves. Digitizing light waves works in a similar way.)

If you want to get a picture into this form, you have two options:

You can take a photograph using a conventional film camera, process the film chemically, print it onto photographic paper and then use a digital scanner to sample the print (record the pattern of light as a series of pixel values). You can directly sample the original light that bounces off your subject, immediately breaking that light pattern down into a series of pixel values -- in other words, you can use a digital camera.

Natalie Hankir Science